An Attempt to Understand Protest
On the way to work Monday morning, I turned on the radio hoping for music, but the morning show host was discussing Sunday’s protest. I am usually irritated by talk radio, but I found myself interested because I was at the protest the previous night. By the time I came to the first stoplight, one caller had ranted about how the “riot was out of control.” The host agreed saying, “the protest definitely picked up some riffraff as the day went on.” Another caller said the “delinquents were taking over the city” and “deserved to be thrown in jail.” Waiting for the green arrow to turn left, I pushed the radio off. A sinking feeling told me these perspectives dismissed the movement I had witnessed, but I too struggled to articulate what had happened...
Daddy Don Offers The Cure for Citizen Rage
As a diligent student of the great Donald Rumsfeld, I think because this human trash keeps getting in the way of APD bullets the best thing to do is to do the same thing we always do whenever whatever we do does not work, which is to say, we do the same thing all over again, but we spend more and more to accomplish the same result, which is a comforting big fat zero, but there is ever more money in the game, more and more profit potential.
“Cover the same old bases to cover your ass. Gun ‘em down if they’re powerless and homeless, or they get in your way. ” That’s what Daddy Don used to say...
A look back at ‘The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud’ by Henry Miller
Published at a time when many artists, if not world citizens, were trying to recover a little poetry in their war-ravaged lives, Henry Miller came out with this book about Arthur Rimbaud, the enigmatic French Symbolist poet who died in 1891 at thirty-seven. As a figure in culture, this poet and adventurer represented Henry’s life-long obsession, a book about the man who haunted him—in his psychic life and his work—and taunted him to see through the blunders of culture: to search his insides and live up to it—if he had the courage. This long essay on Rimbaud explores the depths of the great poet’s truncated life, and his even more stunted life in literature, and it’s clear Henry was always in awe of Arthur...
Too Little Isn’t Enough
I write this on March 29th, 2014. The inscription period for President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act has been moved from two days from now to mid-April, as long as subscribers start their sign-up process by March 31st. This has been President Obama’s signature effort. He prioritized it at the expense of many others. Under the guise of “bringing everyone to the table” he gave seats at that table to the very industries that have kept healthcare in the United States so perverse and expensive: the large insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. Not surprisingly, they had their say and, in many cases, got their way...
‘The Gin Game’ lights up Vista Grande
In the program notes for the East Mountain Center for Theatre’s terrific new production of The Gin Game at the Vista Grande Community Center, actor Tim Reardon comments that he is “of an age when there is likely more experiences behind me than in front.” The same is true of the two characters in this drama, Reardon’s Weller Martin and Georgia Athearn’s Fonsia Dorsey (as well as of this reviewer), which, as Reardon says, “brings a certain perspective"...
New Mexico must be bolder in mitigating racial disparities among children
It’s estimated that children will be a minority-majority population by 2018 nationally. In New Mexico—where 74 percent of children are racial/ethnic minorities—we’re way ahead of the trend.
In fact, only one other state (Hawaii) has a higher percentage of children who are racial or ethnic minorities. We have the highest percentage of Hispanic children, and just two states (Alaska and South Dakota) have higher percentages of Native American children. Just 26 percent of New Mexico’s children are white.
While we rightfully celebrate our rich cultural diversity, New Mexicans and our elected and civic leaders need to take action regarding racial disparities...
The New Game Changer!
Our avuncular mayor has just made a pronouncement of the most profound significance about the James Boyd incident, “It’s a game changer,” he said.
Relief flooded every sinew of my being when I heard that. The mental health and social services game in New Mexico is about to change. Because it’s just a game, see—
Big Government should be Big Business. And then Little Government should be brought to its knees and then be beheaded, please. Companies should be running our schools, our social services, our mental health services. Efficiency. Efficiency. Efficiency...
Weekly Poem: Archeology
We turned our backs & spit
out the medicine of salvation.
We let the sun melt us in a
sweet conspiracy of heat.
Liquefied, we seeped
under white, alkaline soil
& shrugged when wagon
train wheels rolled over us...
A Reckoning Soon For Governor Martinez? Why She Is Vulnerable In 2014
First of all, let me express my disdain for "conventional political wisdom", or these narratives that emerge among the political class (that would be me) and somehow become predominant in political conversation. I am instinctively skeptical of anything-- local or national-- presented as political truth, deemed an unassailable political reality. That Governor Martinez is a shoe-in for re-election in New Mexico, for example. Or that Democrats are going to lose the U.S. Senate in 2014...
Heavy handed ‘Kendra’s Law’ offers simplistic solution for complex problem
Wednesday’s Albuquerque Journal editorial expressing the need for a State law mandating out-patient treatment for seriously mentally ill persons, while provocative and while expressing a widely-held point of view, reaches a faulty conclusion. This is especially true when it attempts to link the need for this “Kendra’s Law” approach to the tragedy involving James Boyd.
The editorial correctly points out that mandated out-patient treatment legislation has been considered and rejected several times by the Legislature in recent years. However, nothing in the Boyd situation changes the terms of the debate or the reasons I’ve opposed Kendra’s Law in the past. Nor does it minimize the importance of finding a solution to both the need for more and better mental health resources and the need for APD to stop shooting mentally ill people...